by Ann Oldenburg, USA TODAY

by Ann Oldenburg, USA TODAY

Andy Cohen stopped by Anderson Cooper Live today to co-host and the two chatted about Cooper coming out.

"You know, Anderson, I haven't seen you," said Cohen, then corrected himself. "I've seen you, I haven't been on TV with you since you publicly came out. It was something that I think a lot of us knew who were friends with you."

"I would hope so! You've known me for 20 years!" Cooper said.

Admits Cohen: "I suspected." Then he said, "Do you feel different now that that is all behind you? Do you feel freer?"

"No," said Cooper. "As you know, I have been open to my friends and my family for my entire adult life. I was really pleased with the response, it's nice to send a message to young people. ... I will say and I actually haven't mentioned this, the only thing that did kind of annoy me and actually it annoyed my mom who brought it up to me: Star Jones, of all people ... said this was a ratings ploy by me to boost ratings."

Noted Andy: "You were off the air!"

Anderson: "That's why it so annoyed me because of all the ways to boost ratings, like if I was wanting to boost ratings I would have waited to announce it on a very special episode, that would have been promo'd for weeks and weeks and there would have been commercials, 'Anderson's huge announcement,' and you would have a cut-away of the audience ... but instead I was in Africa on assignment for 60 Minutes, I sent an e-mail to a friend of mine who put it on a website. I gave no interviews about it, I never talked about it."

He continued, "I wasn't even on the air for days afterward and so suddenly Star Jones, who as memory serves, in terms of boosting ratings, I seem to recall her hocking her wedding every single day to get free products when she was on The View, and I seem to recall her lying about her gastric bypass surgery and making everybody else lie about it as well. So for her to suddenly emerge out of the shadows and suddenly attack me for this, I couldn't believe it.

"And my mom was like, 'Who is Star Jones?' Anyway, so I can't even believe I am bringing this up because I don't even want to give Star Jones the attention. I never planned on talking about this but we invited Star Jones to come on this show and she turned us down."

Andy: "No, come on. I would think she would want to hash it out."

Anderson: "I would think she would want as much publicity as possible given her penchant for wanting publicity. You could be the moderator if she joins us."

Andy: "I would enjoy that very much."

Star didn't go on the show, but she did tweet a response: "I was wrong. @andersoncooper didn't come out as a ratings ploy. He used ME talking about him coming out @todayshow as a ratings ploy. #mybad"